


perfect little satellites

by Cinnamonbookworm



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: F/M, Future Fic, Identity Reveal, Ladrien June, adrien agreste's house is a goddamn mess and hard to explain, adrien's still obsessed w night sky metaphors and so am i, miraculous team is a thing that exists
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-09
Updated: 2016-06-09
Packaged: 2018-07-14 03:16:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7150841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cinnamonbookworm/pseuds/Cinnamonbookworm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"You have her eyes," he'd told her, what feels like forever ago.</i>
</p>
<p>Or: Adrien Agreste can't help but fall into Ladybug's orbit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	perfect little satellites

**Author's Note:**

> CONSIDER THIS INSTALLMENT #2 OF ME BEING OBSESSED WITH THE GODDAMN NIGHT SKY APPARENTLY I DIDN’T GET ALL OF THAT OUT IN HOLES IN A BODY FULL OF STARS SO HERE WE GO AGAIN HERE WE FUCKING GO AGAIN
> 
> also, adrien's house is so so hard to write about in fics because it's terrible and confusing and all that so if any of you are confused about the balcony/window/bathtub ledge thing, here's a pretty detailed guide to adrien's house: http://theywaitforshewho.tumblr.com/post/142726328840/i-write-too-much-ladrien-fic-to-not-have-an

_“You have her eyes,”_ he’d told her, what feels like forever ago.

Adrien Agreste currently does not know two things: The first being why he said that. Ladybug’s eyes had always been so wide and blue and his mother’s were… well, from what he remembers, his mother’s eyes were sad.

Secondly, he doesn’t know where those sad eyes went.

Soft greens turned hard in these ten years she’s been gone. Or maybe her eyes were never really soft at all, maybe they’d just seemed that way when the only other eyes he could compare them to were those deep Mariana Trench voids of his father’s.

She’s not all hard, icicle edges like him, though, just… harder than he remembers her to be.

And she hadn’t even recognized him either; not with the mask on, at least. Not when she’d looked straight through him, straight to the member of their team in green and blue and asked where the _hell_ he’d gotten _that._

The poor kid, barely the same age as when he and Ladybug had first started, was left shaking and nearly crying, whispering that he’d _earned this miraculous_ over and over again.

She’s not cruel, not really. He knows that. She’s just… confused. She doesn’t know what happened with the book and the miraculous and all the ways things have changed since she left. She doesn’t know that Fu lives here now, doesn’t know he’ll sometimes invite them over after battles, still in costume, and they’ll eat pizza together. Sometimes Adrien looks at the masked heroes around him and realizes the only one whose identity he doesn’t know is the same one he started out not knowing.

She’s less an angel than an ally nowadays. And a friend. One of his closest friends.

So, when he looks at her, and still feels that same flush in his face that he felt at the beginning of everything, he can’t help but tuck it away. None of them need this. Not when part of him still wonders if he loves her because of who she is as a person or if it’s because of that first battle.

Sometimes he even wonders if it’s because of that strange allure of the mask.

(But, then again, he never really felt any strange attraction to Chloe when she was wearing Bee’s mask, even before he knew they were one and the same).

When he looks at her now, he doesn’t quite see that same ethereal burst of light whose orbit he couldn’t help but get lost in. He sees a girl. A girl who sometimes carries the burden of the world on her shoulders, who sometimes won’t confide in him, who sometimes yells too loudly at Queen Bee when things don’t go their way.

She’s still a girl whose orbit he can get lost in, though. 

He was right, then; she does have the same eyes as his mother. Starry eyes. Big, starry eyes. And, like stars, they’re so much more terrifying up close.

They got harder over time, too. He’s watched that happen; watched as battles against Hawk Moth have hardened her heart and her body and, most importantly, her eyes. They’re a lot less wide now; a lot less wide and a lot more distant.

Of course, he loves her _anyway._

When he thinks about it, he’s never really stopped. It’s all just changed and grown with the two of them. At least, he thinks she’s changed.

She’s so closed off these days, he can barely tell. They used to be so close and now it feels like she doesn’t know she doesn’t have to be _Atlas_ alone. She has him; she’s _always_ had him.

It’s not like it was with his mother on the rooftop, wind blowing through her blonde hair from under that aviator helmet, where he just looked at her and saw the change flat out; saw the way absence can sometimes _not_ make the heart grow fonder.

There’s no time jump, no switch he can flick, no _before_ and _after_ photos to show him if Ladybug’s still the same girl he fell in love with all those years ago. He doesn’t even know if, like with his mother, he’s been loving this idea that no longer exists for years now.

This is what happens when you let _no attachments_ go to heart. He hopes her alter ego hasn’t taken it to heart as well. An existence like that would be even more lonely than anything he’s experienced.

At least he has Chloe. At least they both know each other and can talk about the hard fights on the hard nights when they’re close to blowing away in the wind. As far as he knows, Ladybug doesn’t have anything like that.

Maybe that’s why he’s being sucked back into her orbit again, tentatively hovering around her, afraid to touch but desperate to help. He just wants her to know she doesn’t have to do this alone. She’s never had to.

Adrien takes a step past the portrait of his mother, the version of her that no longer exists, and heads up to his room. The house is empty, as usual, except for the study. He hears computer clicks. Maybe Nathalie’s in there. Maybe it’s his father. He doesn’t check.

He looks at the telescope he bought a few years ago, when the idea of stars seemed less dangerous, when he hadn’t put to mind yet they were all just like the sun—you could get stuck in their orbit without even trying.

So much more dangerous up close.

The door to his bathroom is still open from his rush that morning, and he spots a flicker of red from the open window above his bathtub.

She’s already waiting on the edge of his balcony, not quite having descended into the room, yo-yo still wrapped around the railing, as if she’s forgotten to unwind it in the wait. He wonders how long she’s been there. He wonders how long she’s been staring at the yo-yo refusing to unwind it, as if she’s about to flee any second now.

He comes to sit down on the edge of the bathtub, right below the open window she’s currently perched on.

“Your mother showed up during our battle against _Knick Knack_ today. Did she try and contact you in any way?”

Her voice is all business, even though she’s not looking at him. He remembers the first time they talked, when neither of them could get through a sentence with each other. Adrien supposes not much has changed since then; now they just talk without looking each other in the eye. 

After all, hadn’t their whole relationship (the one with civilian-him, at least) started with that one second of electric eye contact?

“No,” he begins, voice threatening to collapse against the weight of the subject that is his mother, and all the ways she’s left him alone. “She didn’t try to contact me. I-I saw her, though.”

Ladybug finally makes eye contact. Her eyes are a symphony of pain on his behalf. He wonders if she’s just mirroring his own. “I’m so sorry. That must be… I can’t even imagine… _Adrien._ ”

The way she says his name sounds like a plea for him to know something. He’s not quite sure just what. It’s desperate, though. A desperate plea for something.

“She just looked right through me.”

Days like this, conversations like this, he wonders if she already knows, if that’s the reason she pulled away. 

Didn’t she know, when she pulled away, she was just pulling him with her? They’re just orbiting in a different part of space together now, that’s all.

“ _Adrien._ ” There it is again. That plea for something. He’s too scared to ask what for.

“Tell her… if you see her again. Tell her her family misses her,” he says. He wonders if his mother might look him up tomorrow, if every reunion he ever wished for as a child might still come true.

He wonders if she remembers the stars.

He wonders if she knows she’s become one of them to him. Beautiful from far away and so much more terrifying and all-consuming up close.

Ladybug’s terrifying up close in a different way. She’s terrifying in the way that, times like now, he’s losing himself in her blue eyes, the eyes that are almost entirely closed off, but not quite.

This is why they don’t make eye contact that often anymore.

“I will. I will, Adrien, I promise,” her voice is just as sad as his.

“Guess I can’t say you have her eyes anymore,” he jokes, feebly. An attempt to get her to smile even when he knows her hurt is only because he’s hurting. “You see me, at least. You’ve always seen me.”

“Not always.” She finally untwines the yo-yo, coming to sit down next to him on the edge of the bathtub. Electric eye contact lost to the night. “I admit I can be pretty partial when it comes to you.”

_Volpina._ That one akuma fight he’d let entrench itself in his thoughts. The one where she was willing to give up _everything_ to save him. The one he’d used to fuel all his hopes and dreams for almost a year until they’d culminated into absolutely nothing.

Ladybug taps her mask with her index finger. “Still a little starry-eyed, I guess.”

_Oh._

He should’ve picked up on it sooner, he really should’ve. They’re the same about each other. That same reluctance to meet each other’s eyes, the same jump back when they so much as _touch_ each other.

Adrien doesn’t comment, just kind of gapes and lets her continue on.

“I used to have pictures of you all over my room, and, when I _met you_ — _really_ met you—you were wonderful and everything was wonderful and then—”

“Volpina,” he finishes for her.

“Kind of ruined everything,” Ladybug confirms. “And I just couldn’t… you didn’t want that, I knew you didn’t want that. All these people idolizing you, what’s one more who would die for a mirage of you?”

All the times he’s thought about that day, he’d never realized she would’ve died if she’d given up the earrings. If he hadn’t caught her. If he hadn’t screamed loudly enough…

“Good thing you and Chat Noir got it figured out, then.”

She looks at him, strangely, almost, then smiles. It’s a tired, worn out smile. “And yet you’re still doing all of this for me.”

“Doing what?”

She’s tumbling on. A slow, clumsy tumble, but a tumble nonetheless. It’s like that time Marinette stayed over to study with him for that Chemistry final and ended up struggling her way through the periodic table song, half-asleep and yet still so determined.

Ladybug tucks a curl of his blond hair behind his ear, fingers pausing on his cheek afterwards. He struggles not to blush. “You don’t have to keep pretending,” she answers him without really answering anything.

“I was pretty starry-eyed for you too, Ladybug,” he says, and she doesn’t even blink. He wonders how obvious he must have been. “You were so beautiful and filled with so much light, how could I not love you?”

She freezes on the word _love_ coming from his mouth. He flashes back to a ledge and a confession half-given.

“That’s not a love you want either, to be fair,” Adrien continues, “you don’t want a love where you’re this ethereal star and I’m just a satellite in your orbit. That’s not fair to anyone.”

Ladybug leans her head on his shoulder, he stiffens under his white button-up. “Oh, Chat,” she says, “you’ve never been just a satellite.”

Somehow she figured it out. It could’ve been this afternoon, but he’s figuring much, much sooner. It still makes every nerve on his body tingle, though, to know she knows and she still hasn’t bolted.

“You’re _still_ not just a satellite.”

Her words ring with a promise he wants to fulfill but can’t quite, not when he knows how it feels to wonder if someone would still love you if they knew your other half. He can’t do that to her.

Still, when he looks at her, all he can see is that night with the Periodic Table, Marinette smiling this smile and slurring her words and looking at him like he made up all the stars in the sky.

He’s not willing to take that leap of faith, not just yet. She has to feel ready enough to tell him.

“You’re not either,” he says, and it’s not because he fully understands the difference between their messy warped orbits around each other, but because it’s true. She’s always been more than that. Even after Volpina. _Especially_ after Volpina.

No one’s ever loved him that fiercely before.

“Is this why you pulled away, though? Did my secret identity really scare you that much?” he asks, although he knew the answer before her head even touched his shoulder.

“I wasn’t scared of you, kitty, I was scared of… myself, mostly. I was scared I wouldn’t be enough.”

“How could you not be enough?” Adrien asks her, tucking his legs under him. “You’re _everything_.”

“You don’t even know me.”

“We’re _best friends,_ My Lady, of _course_ I know you. Your favorite color’s pink, you’re always late for everything, you have a hard time agreeing with Queen Bee and you don’t know why, you think you carry the world on your shoulders when _you don’t have to_ because _I’m right here_ and I’ll carry it _with_ you. Any day. Always. Is any of that really different without the mask?”

Ladybug doesn’t answer, but she shakes her head with a little defeated smile, and he supposes that’s an answer all in itself. 

“You’re going to be disappointed.”

“Never,” he tells her, and it’s a promise he intends to keep.

The moon’s the color of camembert, one big round block of it, and its light shines through the window as she takes her head off of his shoulder and looks up at him again, blue eyes softer than he’s seen them be in months.

He can feel her orbit becoming stronger on him, and he doubts any identity reveal in the world could shake him loose. He loves her, _he loves her._ ( _Je t’aime, Ladybug_.) And all he wants is for her to know that. Adrien feels lost in her, in her eyes, her hair, the way she’s always smelled slightly like fresh-baked bread.

Yeah, he knows, he knows in his bones. Like he knows there’s nothing he’d rather do right now than kiss her.

“I don’t think I’ve been here this late since we were studying for that Chemistry test,” she says, and that’s how the knowledge he’s already pictured locks into place, sealing the next few moments into the night. There’s no transformation, no epic reveal of names, nothing except a short memory he’d already been playing on repeat in his head.

“Marinette,” he says, and the gravity is so intense now, he can feel it, pulling him forward until he’s barely a breath away from her. “ _Je t’aime_.”

With or without the mask, it’s true.

The breath becomes an inch, which soon becomes nothing at all.

They say when stars collide, when they’ve spent so much time orbiting around each other, falling deeper and deeper into each other’s gravity, a black hole can form.

No black holes here, though. It’s just him and her and the night pressing in heavy from his open window, the both of them tired from years of secrets. The both of them relieved of the world for just a moment.

He hopes she’ll let him carry it with her this time.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know what it is about them, but they're my favorite pair for angst :). Happy Ladrien June everyone and I hope you all suffered while reading this as much as I did while writing it.


End file.
